I went the opposite way, from an employer with an insane dedicated server to using cloud services, and I was appalled at how weak the cloud SQL servers are. Of

I went the opposite way, from an employer with an insane dedicated server to using cloud services, and I was appalled at how weak the cloud SQL servers are. Of course, they don´t need hardware expenses, licensing is factored in, administration is orders of magnitude easier and cheaper, so the tradeoff is usually worth it.